Wednesday, March 18, 2009

yet more journals

I posted about my pile of reading a while ago, and it has somehow gotten away from my pretty badly. I've tried to get on top of it, and even had gotten the pile to a somewhat diminished state versus its prior grandeur, but any ground I had advanced upon has been lost and then some.

Oddly none of them are that old. Some are several months old, but I don't think any are from before early fall (unlike my pile of C&EN in the shitter at home), and none have been on my desk for more than a month or two. It seems that I've gotten to the point where I can wade through a pile of dead trees this size every month or two now, but the people providing the pile have similarly advanced in their abilities.

I guess this is part of why I seem to have gotten so neurotic about keeping up with the ASAPs of the journals I actually care about. I'm afraid to get behind in yet another huge pile of reading.

8 comments:

I am all for staying current with the literature, but in my humble opinion one should only stay current with a few high quality journals. I stick with Org lett, JACS, JOC, Angew and pretty much that's it. Anything more than that won't stick in my head anyway.

I don't really read them in any depth, and one of my biggest pet peeves is one or two of the journals furthest from what I do don't have a table of contents. I actually have to flip through the whole thing to realize there are no useful articles in there.

That being said I do get a reasonable amount out of all the reading, I just don't know if it is worth the time. For example the journals that take the most time, by far, are Nature and Science, and that is primarily due to my curiosity and desire to follow up on interesting things which aren't necessarily related to chemistry or work. I learn a lot, and 'expand my horizons', but is it really worth the time?

Get the Nature, Nature Chemistry, Scientific American, and Guardian Science podcasts. You can keep up on the interesting science while running a column and without having to read. We all know that reading makes you gay.